When I'm web surfing, I enjoy finding pointers from other people's home pages
to stuff they think is interesting.
I've found some of my favorite pages that way.
So it seems only fair that I should do for others like I'd have them do unto
(unfor?) me.

This page is really just a hotlist with delusions of grandure:
when I find a URL that I want to hang on to, for whatever reason,
I put it here.
Making it globally available is my way of contributing to WebCulture.
Since I'd be putting in the effort to maintain my "hotlist" anyway,
I can get the satisfaction of contributing at essentially no extra cost.

It's still just my hotlist, though.
Traditionally, major web indices —the classic example being
yahoo—
started a lot like this page, with grad students trying to organize
their own growing collection of links, and they just kept growing.
I can't afford to let that happen; there are already good
general indices out there and I just don't have the time.
I sincerely hope you find lots of fun and interesting stuff here,
and I'm making it available to you in the hopes that you will,
but it isn't intended to be a web index per se.
Some of the pointers from here are to other people's pages that
are pretty comprehensive, such as
FAQs,
but these pointers are only here because I decided I wanted them.
Every pointer on this page is here on my sufferance.

Because there are lots of different reasons for me to want to keep a URL,
and all of them end up here, you'll find an enormous range of variation
in the quality of the stuff here.
IMHO, some of it's really neat, some of it is just barely worth saving,
and most of it is somewhere in between.
Deciding which is which is left as an exercise for the student.

After about a year as a web publisher,
I came to appreciate just how often pages on the web move around.
Nothing seems to stay put.
Of course I'd update a URL when I noticed it was out of date,
but I didn't even know how long ago I'd last tested each URL.
So I instituted the following time-keeping system.

Each entry has one or two dates on it.

The first date is the last time the URL was changed.
If this date is recent, either I've just added the pointer,
or I've just changed it because I discovered the target page had moved.
If this date is old, I haven't changed the URL in a long time.

The second date, if any,
is a more recent time as of which I know the pointer still worked.
If there is no second date,
that's because it would be the same as the first date.

If the first date is old and the second date is recent,
you're looking at a fairly stable URL:
I put it in a long time ago, and it was still working pretty recently.
If a stable URL like that doesn't work for you,
there's a good chance the problem is only temporary.

Lists of favorites(Once there were many of these; somewhere, though, society has forgotten
what richness is lost when we give up our nagivation to search engines.
The same happened to library catalogs, around the turn of the century;
most of the rich human insight built into the cross-references of the old
physical card catalogs was lost.)

Warner Bros.
(site tends to be geegaw-laden and, somewhat related thereto,
often partly or completely dysfunctional;
I've been tolerating it for many years,
but am just about fed up and may drop it one of these times)
(16-Sep-96; 12-Nov-16)

Revalency (accent on the second syllable), a musing of my own.
(just a language feature that could be used in a conlang,
therefore it's properly a resource rather than a conlang as such;
but it's creative,
therefore it seemed more appropriate here than above)
(11-Feb-07; 03-Nov-16)

"Well-behaved parsing of extensible-syntax languages"
(pdf)
(ps.gz),
a mathematical treatment I'd been developing for an appallingly long time
before I finally made it a techreport
(30-Mar-10; 14-Nov-16)

Richard Brodie's Home Page
(I don't think he really groks memes
— strike that, I think he really doesn't grok memes,
or at least really didn't when he wrote his book —
but I did read his book, so what the heck)
(23-Feb-00; 14-Oct-16)

IWBasic
(a language with "BASIC like syntax",
which pretty much sums up the eventual legacies
of all popular programming languages:
the best semantic features are all scrapped,
typically because they're hard to separate out from features
that are inconsistent with new trends in language design,
while the superficial syntax is perpetuated.
Look at C and Java....
The semantics of the successor languages aren't necessarily bad,
mind you, but I don't think any of those old languages would have been
popular if there hadn't been something worthwhile in the old semantics,
from which the successors regularly fail to learn.)
(15-Apr-10; 09-Oct-16)

Harpoon
("designed to provide one syntax for all range of documents,
configuration files, knowledge representations, object serialization
and even for scripts and large-scale programs")
(03-Mar-08; 05-Dec-16)

An "esoteric" programming language is a programming language that is
deliberately designed to be perverse.
That's in contrast to the vast majority of "non-esoteric"
programming languages, which are perverse without anyone deliberately
making them that way.

I've been thinking about designing an esoteric language myself for years,
and once I even started one; but it's been difficult for me,
because the usual way of making a language hard to use is to omit
abstraction support, and I just can't find it in my heart to design
a language that way. The obvious solution is to design a language
that supports abstraction in a perverse way — but it's hard to imagine
any way of supporting abstraction that would be more perverse than the way
C++ does it.

Extensibility, as a movement, was the predecessor of abstraction.&nbsp
Simula in its early years was presented as an extensible language.&nbsp
The move from extensibility to abstraction was a classic paradigm shift,
with the attendant ruthless supression of the predecessor,
to the point where the whole extensibility movement is almost invisible
in the history books
(though its erasure was more nearly complete a quarter century ago,
when object-orientation was on the rise instead of on the decline).&nbsp
In fairness,
the extensibility movement was never as big as its successor became,
although some of the more extreme paeans to the advantages of abstraction
could have been taken verbatim from writings on extensibility.&nbsp

There's been a new wave of extensible languages since around the turn
of the century.
I'm a bit concerned about a tendancy to not learn from past mistakes;
not that I don't believe in extensibility,
I just don't believe in unstructured extensibility,
just as I don't believe in unstructured control flow.
(On the difference between structure and restriction,
see my design of the
Kernel programming language,
especially guideline G4 on type encapsulation.)

A general observation about programming languages that cater to
non-programmers:
There seem to be two diametrically opposite ways to go about it.
You can dumb down your language,
hoping to bring it within reach of non-programmers;
or you can improve it until it's so good that even non-programmers
can handle it.
(If you think that improving your language will make it harder
for non-programmers to handle, you might want to rethink
what constitutes an improvement.)
Any researcher in this area should ask,
am I trying to make my language dumb, or good?

Most new languages today are dynamic
(as Lisp programmers have always known they should be),
and capable of interoperating with other languages;
one could also ask that a scripting language support entering commands
at an interpreter prompt, but that's mostly orthogonal to paradigm,
and in principle about any language could
be implemented that way.
The criterion for including a language here is, consequently,
not merely that the language could be put here,
but that I don't see how to justify putting it anywhere else
except miscellaneous.

Lua
(self-identifies primarily as a scripting language;
not an extensible language in my sense,
so if not here it would be miscellaneous)
(18-Sep-03; 25-Oct-16)

The Falcon Programming Language
(Was once put here because it only self-identified as a scripting language;
now it claims to "provide six integrated programming paradigms".
Further study is called for; one of these times when I recheck the link,
perhaps — but my notes say it "has objects and classes,
but only incidentally;" if that's also its level of involvement
in all the other paradigms it lists, it may only reclassify as
"miscellaneous", which would be unwelcome since I already have too many
languages there.)
(08-Feb-05; 07-Nov-16)

From time to time I tackle semiotics yet again; it seems so dratted
relevant. I've never made any significant progress, though,
because every description of it I've ever studied is a veritable flood of
words whose information density is so low as to be undetectable.
I've finally decided the best way to get a handle on it is probably to
just systematically read a glossary on the subject. Maybe next time.

"Magicians, especially since the Gnostic and the Quabala influences,
have sought higher consciousness through assimilation and control of
universal opposites—
good/evil, positive/negative, male/female, etc.
But due to the steadfast pomposity of ritualism inherited
from the ancient methods of the shaman, occultists have been blinded to what
are
perhaps the two most important pairs of apparent or earth-plane
opposites: ORDER/DISORDER and SERIOUS/HUMOROUS."
— Principia Discordia.

The Foundation Center
("Strengthening the social sector
by advancing knowledge about philanthropy")
(18-Sep-98; 25-Oct-16)

Lifeboat Foundation
('launched', in the first quarter of 2002 I believe,
by the same guy who ran the Oceania thing;
has changed specific emphasis since launch —
used to be about building space stations,
now talking about an "AIShield")
(27-Sep-02; 28-Sep-16)

A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies
(This is a bit different from the other items I've listed under
"ideologies", but I felt this was where it belongs;
in the "issues" section it would be lost without a trace)
(16-Apr-02; 03-Dec-16)

International Sociobiology Institute
It was at "http://hrolson.freeyellow.com/page4.html",
and disappeared when FreeYellow discontinued free Web hosting plans.
When last I checked (three years later),
there were still broken links to it all over the web, because
(1) it was pretty much the
page people linked to on sociobiology, and
(2) people don't bother to check that their web links still work,
even though broken links are rampant and can severely degrade the value of
a collection of links.
(Not that I don't know how that happens;
I too learned the hard way that web content has to be maintained,
witness my adaptive grammar pages...
but it's still kind of disappointing to see.
My surfing page is, of course, my own partial solution to the problem,
allowing me to keep a big pile of links without spending more than about
fifteen minutes a day on it... most days...)
01-Sep-00; 10-Mar-04.

La Paranoia Home Page.
It was at "http://www.paranoia.com/",
what is by now quite a long time ago.
25-Oct-95; 19-Nov-99.

When they took the fourth amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the sixth amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
When they took the second amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
Now they've taken the first amendment, and I can say nothing about it.